Aries: Enlarge Your Soul with Acts of Courage
- Lelia
- 14 hours ago
- 6 min read
For Aries, life is a proving ground. It takes you to your edges, tests your courage, and sometimes shoves you in the chest and dares you to do something about it. This is the energy of the Warrior, the Pioneer, the Daredevil, the Bodyguard.
With Mars and his Ascendant in Aries, poet Walt Whitman’s warrior energy was apparent in his explosive bursts of temper. Once as a youngster, Walt was fishing when a neighbor boy threw stones in the water and rowed over his fishing line. Walt thrashed the kid so badly he was brought up on charges. When authorities decided the boy deserved what he got, the charges were dropped, and Walt beat the kid a second time for good measure.
“Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Akhilleus' anger, doomed and ruinous…”
Anger is one form Aries energy can take. It tells you where your boundaries are and when they’ve been violated. How will you respond? The answer to that question may be part of the epic of your life, just as it’s an animating energy in The Iliad.
In that poem we see the low-roads of anger — the wounded pride that prompts Achilles to withdraw from battle in a sulk, the unheeding battle fury that drives Patroklos too far into enemy territory and costs him his life.
But we also see anger’s potency. Ares, the god, suffuses Hector so “his bone and sinew thrilled with power and will to fight.” Similarly, Hera and Athena rouse Achilles’ healthy anger after the death of his friend, giving Achilles “baleful radiance” and amplifying his cries so the enemy is shocked into tumult “and twelve good men took mortal hurt.”
Having planets in Aries doesn’t mean you have to engage in epic combat — or that you have to be angry all the time — but it does suggest that life will bring regular contests and you must ride out to meet them. You enlarge your soul with acts of courage.
Take risks. Author Flannery O’Connor, with an Aries Sun, Moon & Mercury, knew the benefit of challenging herself. In a letter to a friend, she wrote, “I am very happy right now writing a story in which I plan for the heroine, age 63, to be gored by a bull. I am not convinced yet that this is purgation or whether I identify myself with her or the bull. In any case, it is going to take some doing to do it and it may be the risk that is making me happy.”
Be bold. Emily Dickinson (with Aries Mars & Pluto in the 5th house), although reclusive, was not tremulous. She allowed Aries’ fiery creative urge to carry her into writing. After her first poetic ventures, she wrote to a friend, “I have dared to do strange things — bold things, and have asked no advice from any… and life has had an aim, and the world has been too precious.”
Later in a poem, she says it this way:
“I took my power in my hand, and went against the world/ It was not so much as David had, but I was twice as bold.”
Push your edges. With four planets in Aries, surrealist artist Leonora Carrington pushed herself to a series of liberations — from the constriction of her proper British upbringing, from confinement as a mental patient, and from the threat of the war engulfing Europe in 1940.
Her biographer Joanna Moorhead writes that Carrington “always seemed to thrive in situations where she had to start afresh; she was the antithesis of the kind of person who clings to long-term friendships and well-worn paths. She made a virtue of finding herself in a new environment, surrounded by people she hadn’t known previously, who spoke of things she hadn’t encountered before.”
Find worthy forms of expression. Hunter S. Thompson, whose Saturn was in Aries, said, “I know that I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life expressing [individuality] one way or another, and I think that I’ll accomplish more by expressing it on the keys of a typewriter than by letting it express itself in sudden outbursts of frustrated violence.”
Defend your potency. Genuine power isn’t about violence, control or victimization. It’s about potency — being able to act on the world effectively. As Thomas Moore writes, “When we allow ourselves to exist truly and fully we sting the world with our vision and challenge it with our own ways of being.”
Writer Clarice Lispector describes her loss of potency when she took up the life of a diplomat’s wife. “From the moment I resigned myself, I lost all my vivacity and all my interest in things. Have you seen the way a castrated bull turns into an ox? That is what happened to me… To adapt to something I can’t adapt to, to get over my dislikes and my dreams… I cut off inside me the way I could hurt others and myself. And at the same time I cut off my strength.”
Accept the need for friction. The parts of you conditioned by Aries are not intended to be docile. You have other astrological signs active in your chart which may be gracious, kind, stoic, joyful or calm, but your Aries planets develop out of friction — rubbing up against other entities in the scrum of life.
Writer Marguerite Duras acknowledges that her Aries Sun & Venus can be abrasive. “My character? Ask people what they think. I have a difficult character. My son says I’m unbearable. Maybe!”
Make contact with energy. Described at times as ruthless and unsentimental, photographer Lee Miller was invigorated by charged experiences. Her Mercury in Aries awakened when risk was involved. Pushing social boundaries through surrealist art, sexual adventures and daring experiences that included snake charming, she came into her artistic voice as British Vogue’s war correspondent during WWII. During the Blitz in London in 1940, Miller photographed the “laws of blast” which might leave a damaged Remington typewriter perched on a pedestal. Her work captured the beauty and horror of wartime destruction while also expressing inner tumult and liberation. Photographing Wrens (Women's Royal Naval Service) at work welding or casting gears in a furnace, Miller captures images “of women in touch with pure energy.”
Aries planets like to be in touch with pure energy. Learning what puts you there is part of your evolutionary path.
Shoulder the cost. Aries will not consent to be romanticized. Every outlay has a cost. Lee Miller’s need for adrenaline brought her, with her camera, to the Nazi concentration camps shortly after liberation. The atrocities she documented left lasting emotional scars. Decades later she said, “I got in over my head. I could never get the stench of Dachau out of my nostrils.”
With a body count on almost every page, The Iliad teems with examples of the hard price of battle. Even Achilles’ defeat of Hector is sorrow-tinged and the epic ends with the meeting of two-grief stricken enemies. Priam, mourning the deaths of many sons, comes unprotected to Achilles’ camp to ransom Hector’s body. And Achilles, at ease among his men but heart-broken over Patroklos’ death, receives Priam in a brief respite from enmity. They have the courage to meet unarmored, without posturing, without the rush of anger that feels so much more empowering than heartbreak, and to see each other in their humanity and inherent dignity, even as they know that the carnage will continue and both will lose their lives before the war ends. This is a different kind of valor, but it also belongs to Aries.
Sources:
Laure Adler: Marguerite Duras: A Life.
Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life.
Homer, The Iliad. Translated by Robert Fitzgerald.
Justin Kaplan, Walt Whitman: A Life.
Thomas Moore, A Religion of One’s Own.
Joanna Moorhead, Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington.
Benjamin Moser, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector.
Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O'Connor.
Richard Sewell, The Life of Emily Dickinson.
Hunter S. Thompson, "The Art of Journalism No. 1," The Paris Review, Fall 2000.